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I have said on Social Media that Gerrymandering is “Voter Suppression”. Its purpose is to give one political party to gain an advantage by drawing up voting districts in various Local, State and National elections that are favorable to them. What gerrymandering does is it silences people’s votes. Both States that I have lived in have been heavily gerrymandered, Wisconsin and Florida. In the case of Wisconsin, they have a Democratic Governor and both the State Assembly and the State Senate are heavily Republican. The only time an American can truly let their voices be heard is at the polls when they vote. Why is gerrymandering so important to the Republican Party? It is all a matter of control. As America becomes more and more diverse the more panicked the Republicans have become, they feel as a party they are losing control.  Gerrymandering actually helps holds us back on solving many of our nation’s problems.

The majority of people are in favor of gun control so you would think that it would be easy to enact common sense gun control. Because of gerrymandering the minority opinion is the opinion that refuses to enact gun control. Our children are dying but even though the majority favors gun control it doesn’t happen because, as I stated, gerrymandering silences people’s voices. I wonder how we got here.  It couldn’t  have happened over night. It took time. In 1812 the Boston Gazette ran a political cartoon showing what is called “a new species of monster”. It was a forked-tongue creature  that was shaped like a Massachusetts voting district that the state’s Jeffersonian Republicans had drawn to benefit their own party. In 1812, the Jeffersonian Republicans only got 49 percent of the vote but controls 29 of 40 state districts. You can plainly see that gerrymandering is to establish minority rule. Gerrymandering got even  worse when the freed Black got the right to vote after the Civil War. Congress in the 1870 said that districts had to be continuous, meaning that they couldn’t be divided from different areas of the State. That resulted in South Carolina Democrats creating what was called a “boa constrictor” district. That  concentrated the Black Americans, at the time, which made up the majority of the state’s population into one district with the rest of them being White.

The funny thing that made much of the gerrymandering in the South not needed - the poll tax and plain old voter suppression such as voter intimidation and in some cases lynching. The Supreme Court in the in the 1960s under the guidance of Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled that all state voting districts must have roughly equal populations. Every State had to start adjusting their Congressional districts after every 10 year census so that each of the 435 members in the U.S. House of Representatives represented roughly the same number of people. I think that these series of rulings led to the explosion of the gerrymandering which happened in the 1990s and continues onto today. I feel the Republicans fear they will never be able to win another election if gerrymandering is eliminated and voting rights are expanded. Can you explain to me how a Democracy or a Constitutional Republic as some people call us can justify the suppression of people voting? Participating in our Government is what our  Forefathers wanted. So why is there so much voter suppression?  One reason is we are no longer a White nation. We actually have never been just a White nation but the power has always rested in the White population. The more diverse we have become, the more threatened the old White establishment gets.

Our Constitution was not written with two parties in mind. Our Constitution was written so “We the People”, could have representative government. Was it always fair?  No it wasn’t. That is why it has had to be amended over time to make it fair and just for the period of time that we live in. You have to remember that once an Amendment is adopted that Amendment is now part of the Constitution and it means as much as every other section of the Constitution. That is the beauty of the Constitution, it is a living document that can change over time as the needs of the people change. It is also means that as the World, and the needs of the World changes so does our Constitution. Was there suppression in the beginning?  Yes, Black slaves were counted as 3/5th of a person for population totals when it came to the number of  representatives that were sent to Washington though they didn’t have 3/5th of a vote to choose who represented them. The Civil War changed that.

Wisconsin has now been ordered to end gerrymandering and redraw the districts fairly. Robin Vos who leads the Republicans in Wisconsin has promised to appeal. Why? Gerrymandering is not in the Constitution and neither are the Republicans and the Democrats. What is in the Constitution is that the people have a right to vote for who they want to represent them. Republicans, Democrats and gerrymandering  none of those things have a right to exist by the Constitution but the right of the people to choose who represents them does. As long as gerrymandering exists you will never be able to start to drain the swamp. Until you elect people that truly represent the people instead to the self-interests the swamp will always be there because it is money in the first place that made that swamp. We have to start by ending gerrymandering. My problem is I don’t really trust the Supreme Court to do what is best for the Country and the Constitution.

 

 

 

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